Diane Jones at the Celebration of Traditional Music, Berea, Kentucky, October 1997.
Photo by Geoff Eacker

DIANE JONES was born in New Jersey but adopted West
Virginia as her home so she could be near old-time music.
She says she got hooked on the banjo “as soon as I heard it”
at a music festival in Boone, North Carolina, where she
purchased her “little mountain banjo” from an old-time
musician and instrument maker. After taking a banjo class
from Dwight Diller, Diane went on to teach banjo at the
Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, WV. Her playing style
has been influenced by Ola Belle Reed, Maggie Hammons of
Pocahontas County, WV, and Lily May Ledford. She once heard
Lily May in person and remembers being inspired not only
“because here was a woman banjo player just singing her
heart out. That’s not what got me. It was the playing.”

Diane is keenly aware that she is a woman banjo
player. She was once in a banjo contest with one other woman
and fifty-six men. As the only female banjo player in a
group of male fiddlers, she says that “it used to be that
they’d sort of look at you like ‘we don’t need this woman.’
I still get it as a joke: ‘You’re my favorite banjo
player—for a girl.’”

She has recorded a CD with banjoists Hubie King entitled
There Are No Rules. Of this work she says: “If
anybody listens to me and likes something particular and it
moves them the way it has moved me, the whole thing was
worth every dime.”